9 Video Games With Seriously Morbid Background Lore

9. Fallout

Although Fallout is known as a franchise with a wry sense of humour (no, I'm not referring to how much of a joke Fallout 76 turned out to be), there's a dark, sinister undercurrent that runs underneath all its entries.

Sure, there are areas out in Fallout's wasteland that hold all manner of terrifying lore tidbits - The Dunwich Borers in Fallout 4, for example, hold all sort of ghostly scares, and The Ultra-Luxe in New Vegas is home to some hauntingly cannibalistic high-society gamblers.

Yet, little of the game's deeper lore can match that of the Vaults, some of which you'll read about in data logs and others you'll have the honour of exploring yourself. These pre-war bomb shelters may have kept thousands alive after the surprise nuclear annihilation of Fallout's America, however, they double up as horrific experiments that test human psychology among other, far more grotesque experiments.

From forcing inhabitants to perform a barbaric, democratically-decided annual sacrifices to creating a mutating chemical agent that transforms people of the wasteland into crazed, lunatic monsters (and even melds one man into a disgusting part-mutant, part-supercomputer monstrosity), these vaults are dark.

While the world of Fallout has always been a dangerous place, its vaults remind you that humanity is crueller than any Deathclaw or Yao Guai.